


The Reindeer Nightmare of '09

by ChillinLikeVillains



Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: And screws things up, But not super cracky, Fluff and Crack, Harry Hart is a Little Shit, Kinda Cracky, Literally a herd of mechanical reindeer, Mechanical Reindeer, Percilot is only mentioned, Pre-Canon, Rudolph the Rampaging Reindeer, SNAFU, Sorry Kingsman Manor, Structural Damage, and then blames James
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-09 04:47:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5525903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChillinLikeVillains/pseuds/ChillinLikeVillains
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Well since the Angels Incident of ‘97, the Garlands Debacle of ‘02 and the Reindeer Nightmare of ‘09, the late Arthur had put a ban on all the stuff and confiscate it all.”</p>
<p>Ladies and Gentlemen, here is the story of the Reindeer Nightmare of '09.</p>
<p>In which Harry Hart is a little shit, Merlin is the exact opposite of happy, James wonders what he did in a past life to deserve this, and Percival is a honey badger, who does not give a shit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Reindeer Nightmare of '09

**Author's Note:**

  * For [elletromil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elletromil/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Kisses Like a Thousand Snowflakes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5512478) by [elletromil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elletromil/pseuds/elletromil). 



> Thank you so much to Knuckleblister, who was my beta, and to elletromil, whose fic "Kisses Like a Thousand Snowflakes" acted as the inspiration for this. I read the line "Reindeer Nightmare of '09" and suddenly I could see exactly what happened and knew I had to write it out. So, have a little (or not so little, since this kind of got out of hand) fic to celebrate Christmas. Enjoy!

Looking back, they should've known Harry was the one to blame.

 

Granted, it technically  _ was  _ James’ fault since he had been the one to persuade the tech department to create them in the first place, but he had had good intentions at the time. Mostly.

 

For all that James loved to cause trouble, he tended to limit structural damage to missions. He knew just how thin of a line he walked when it came to pissing off Arthur, and had no desire to incur the kind of wrath that would come from physically damaging the manor and not just the Knights who used it as headquarters. Besides, he had been behind the last few incidents that occurred during the holiday season, and if anything funny happened this year everyone would without a doubt blame him. So he came up with an idea that would generate plenty of holiday spirit without breaking Arthur’s rule of “nothing big or moving inside the manor”.

 

A mechanical reindeer team pulling a sleigh on a charted path across the grounds, plenty far from the manor, that may or may not blast Christmas music loud enough that it could be heard inside.

 

The music bit he left up to the engineers who were actually building it, but the rest? The rest was his idea.

 

So of course, he should've known Harry would take advantage of this opportunity, and use it to fuck with Merlin. Because Harry, above all else, was a little shit, and would absolutely risk damaging the manor if it meant pissing off Merlin and getting away with it. And since James was infamous for his holiday hijinks, of course everyone would blame him, and Harry knew it.

 

The team worked perfectly for the first two weeks of December. The course was plotted just right so that you had to be in the exact right place at the exact right time to catch a glimpse of it (and the Knights were extremely skilled at being in the right place at the right time and within two days they had all seen it. Twice) and the music was just loud enough that you could always faintly hear it. This had the added benefit of driving Arthur half-mad since he never left his office, which meant he never saw the team, which meant he constantly heard Christmas music in the back of his head without knowing why.

 

It was all working just fine for those two weeks. And then Harry Motherfucking Hart intervened and it all went horribly, horribly, wrong.

 

Harry snuck out to where the team shut down for the night and quietly removed the Rudolph reindeer that was leading the team, complete with a shiny red nose, and hauled it back to the manor. To this day, no one knows just how he got it back since the reindeer were scaled to the size of actual reindeer and each one weighed approximately the same as a Kingsman taxi, but the most popular rumor is that he somehow managed to activate its running function and rode it to the manor. The techs responsible for its creation almost came forward to reveal that Rudolph could only run one set path and there was no way Hart could’ve managed to override its programming, but upon seeing the shade of purple Arthur’s face turned whenever the word “reindeer” was mentioned, they wisely decided to keep quiet and just let James take as much of the blame as possible.

 

No matter how Harry did it, how he got it to the manor is not nearly so important as what he did with it once he got it there.

 

Merlin had spent the last 96 hours overseeing a particularly delicate mission, and of those 96 hours he had spent exactly none of them sleeping. As a result, the minute the mission was over, Merlin had crashed in the soundproof bedroom right next to his office, which had been built for this exact purpose in the earliest years of Kingsman. The bedroom even had a locking mechanism, designed by the previous Merlin, that no Knight had been able to pick and no tech had been able to hack, and which could only be locked and unlocked by the current Merlin. Everyone knew that if Merlin fell asleep in that room with the door locked, no one and nothing could wake him for the 12 hours he typically crashed for after going a long period of time with no rest.

 

Everyone, including Harry, knew this. And everyone, except Harry, feared Merlin’s wrath too much to even approach his office while he was catching up on sleep, much less to actually enter.

 

And oh, Harry did more than enter.

 

He stole Rudolph from the front of the team and rigged him up to the door to Merlin’s office so that the next person to enter the room, which was guaranteed to be Merlin himself, would turn on the reindeer’s music function and cause Christmas music to be blasted at the highest volume the reindeer was capable of. He even wrapped the poor reindeer in what must’ve been five 15 feet long strings of Christmas lights and programmed the nose to flash in time with the lights.

 

Needless to say, Merlin would be in for quite a shock whenever he woke up and tried to go back to work. But not in the way Harry thought, because Harry had forgotten one important thing.

 

The reindeer team itself wasn’t programmed to run a specific course - only the leader, Rudolph, was. The techs hadn’t had the time to program each individual reindeer if they wanted the team up and running by December 1st. So, they bolted the team together in a way that would give them the range of movement they needed while allowing Rudolph to guide them. They also set the team on a schedule so they would automatically activate and start running at sunrise, and stop whenever they completed the circuit closest to sunset.

 

Harry hadn’t actually known the first part, and could honestly say he hadn’t known the team outside would start running around the grounds wildly until it crashed into the East Wing of the manor, causing an impressive explosion that set off several alarms and called every Knight to headquarters to respond to an attack on the manor. He truly hadn’t known that would happen.

 

The one thing Harry had forgotten was to disable Rudolph’s running function so all it could do was play music and flash lights. And Harry recalled this little piece of information directly at sunrise, when Rudolph’s running function switched on and it attempted to run its programmed course, regardless of any structures or living beings that were in its way (Kingsman techs were good, but since they had never intended the reindeer to leave their designated area, they never bothered installing a tracking system or giving them scanners that could detect humans or building the joints in a way that allowed them to dodge fairly well. All they could do was run, and that became blatantly obvious that mid-December morning).

 

The Knights arrived at headquarters in a panic and headed straight for the tech department, the standard procedure since typically the techs had some kind of intel regarding the attackers and might even be able to use the security system alone to capture or . . . dispose . . . of them. This tactic might have worked against the mechanical reindeer, if not for the fact that the entrance to the tech department was just down the hall from Merlin’s office, and before the Knights could be told what was wrong they were taken out of commission by a crazed Rudolph playing “Deck the Halls” at a deafening level while crashing into walls and covered in so many Christmas lights it was a miracle the thing wasn’t on fire.

 

Rudolph managed to knock out half the Knights, giving them concussions that ranged from one mild enough to only  result in a headache, to severe enough to cause memory loss. The other half of the Knights quickly found themselves unable to stop the reindeer, and were having trouble doing any kind of damage at all (the reindeer had been built to withstand severe weather, and oh did the techs regret that decision now). They had no other option than to retreat, and were eventually forced to simply stand back and hope the damn thing would bust itself apart on one of the walls.

 

By the time Rudolph had managed to destroy itself, it had also managed to destroy no less than two dozen walls, every piece of furniture within the section of the manor housing Merlin’s office, and so many pieces of art that it would take roughly three years before they could all be replaced. There were no fatalities, but cuts, bruises, black eyes, concussions, broken or fractured bones, and death threats became commonplace at the UK headquarters in the months following the incident.

 

But the threats spewing from the mouths of the Knights were nothing compared to Merlin’s reaction upon waking from his exhaustion-induced coma - only to find half of headquarters damaged, starting with his a hole in his office and almost all of his equipment torn up.

 

Arthur himself ordered that the manor be evacuated after glimpsing the look on the quartermaster’s face through a security camera, and as every single bloody person on the grounds ran for their life, no one noticed the one person who stayed behind to face the wrath of his oldest friend.

 

Of course, the evacuation meant no one was around to see Merlin hack into Rudolph and the other reindeer and get them to march their broken, burned bodies out of the manor, where he proceeded to use an experimental new explosive to blow the shit out of them. No one was around to see him also use an experimental flame-thrower to burn the shit out of them so they could never be repaired. Ever.

 

And absolutely no one was around to witness Harry running like hell with a manic grin on his face as Merlin hunted him through the manor, screaming threats so violent and so detailed that most men, other than the fleeing Galahad, would become physically sick at some of the images coming out of the Scotsman’s mouth.

 

This “alone time” between Harry and Merlin, of which both emerged covered in more blood than they had been before, also meant no one knew that it was Harry who had put Rudolph in Merlin’s office and caused the incident which would have made them the laughingstock of the organization had any of the other branches found out about it.

 

No one was quite sure what to call it except for “the Incident,” until several techs reported to medical asking for sleeping pills since nightmares of mechanical reindeer coming to eat them were keeping them from doing their jobs properly.

 

Thus, “The Reindeer Nightmare of ‘09” was born, and everyone knew exactly who was to blame for it. Or at least, they thought the did.

 

Arthur had had James suspended for a month before the personnel had even finished evacuating the manor, and would have done much worse after things had calmed down, if there had been any evidence that James was the one behind it.

 

The simple fact was that, while James admitted to coming up with the idea of the reindeer team, he firmly denied spiriting it away and placing it in Merlin’s office. Since there was no evidence he was the one behind it (and Merlin knew which little shit of a Knight had actually done it), Arthur technically couldn’t do more than suspend him for giving the techs the idea in the first place.

 

Percy, of course, was the only one to believe that James hadn’t been behind it, but refused to tell the others since James had brought it upon himself by coming up with the idea of the reindeer in the first place. The cold shoulder he got from the Knights upon his return was such a pain in the arse to deal with.

 

James was surprised, though, by how Harry was acting. Given how close he and Merlin were, James was sure Harry would be acting more insufferable than all of the other Knights put together given that everyone believed James was the culprit. Yet the quick-tempered Galahad acted completely normal, and was even friendlier towards him than he had been before. Roughly a week after he returned from suspension, James discovered a note in the mail

  
_ You have my most sincere gratitude for acting as the perfect fall man for my prank on Merlin. Don’t worry about the others, they’ll get over it soon enough. Though, you might want to watch your back tomorrow. I’ve heard whispers of some kind of trap involving mashed potatoes and some kind of stuffed bird. Perhaps turkey? Either way, consider this warning payment for taking the blame. Good luck, and remember: no one will believe you. - H.H. _


End file.
